Typical Day

Peter Puter is up at 9:15. He presses a single button by his bedside that connects a series of circuits that in turn lift him out of bed, run him through the shower, slip him into his clothes, and feed him breakfast. Then he wakes up. Come on—he's not that good.

After Peter has finished getting himself ready manually, he heads to the office that is his current place of employment—a software design company that has retained his services to write the script for a new instructional carpentry program they hope to have on the shelves by next year. After getting his morning coffee, Peter meets with his contractor to go over some details regarding the desired structure and flow of the program. The contractor lets him know what color scheme he has in mind, how tab-heavy he would like the home screen to be, and how he envisions a user navigating their way through the program. Peter then goes to his computer (his computer's name is Clarissa, by the way—draw your own conclusions) and starts programming.

He spends all morning inputting and editing the programming language for the software, checking intermittently with the contractor to make sure he is interpreting the intended layout correctly. It's a good thing that he does, as he learns the contractor intended for several tabs in particular to be static rather than drop-downs. Close call.

Aw, they're just playin'.

As he goes, Peter makes notes in a separate document that explains each line of coded language so that a layman (any of Peter's millions of inferiors) can understand it. He works through lunch, snacking on baby carrots in between keystrokes.

At around 2, he does a couple trial runs of the beginning stages of the program to make sure everything has been coded correctly and it is behaving as it should. Each section that needs to be tweaked or corrected is noted, and Peter spends the rest of the afternoon fixing these occurrences. (If you were to ask him, he would say these weren't "mistakes," merely "meanderings.") Upon seeing the layout, the contractor realizes that having those tabs static doesn't work so well, and Peter had the right idea originally by making them drop-downs. Duh. If only people would stop having their own ideas and just let him do his thing....

Peter finally wraps things up at 9pm and heads home. There are a couple of late programs he'd like to catch this evening, and neither of them involve javascript.